AGE OF POWER: A New Musical About Nikola Tesla And Thomas Edison To Electrify The Wallis Annenberg Center

AGE OF POWER, a new American musical about the war between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison to electrify the world, is set to have a professional staged reading at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills on March 29 for an invited audience.

LA Theatre Works, whose mission it is to record and preserve Great Performances of important stage plays, has committed to producing a new podcast that follows AGE OF POWER's journey with an unfettered look behind the scenes of how a new musical is created. "Following the fortunes of AGE OF POWER as it makes its way, hopefully, to Broadway is going to be a fascinating listening experience for theatre lovers everywhere," says LA Theatre Works Producing Director Susan Loewenberg.

The creative team includes Mark Hollmann (Tony award-winning composer of URINETOWN,) Emmy Award-winning writers Dave Caplan (ROSEANNE, THE CONNERS) and Allen Jay Zipper (Tracey Ullman: TRACEY TAKES ON and George Lopez.) Broadway director, Kimberly Senior (Pulitzer Prize-winning drama - DISGRACED,) and Musical Director David O (Ovation Award for SOFT POWER - Ahmanson Theater.) The cast consists of leading musical theater talent from Los Angeles and New York.

The battle between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla unleashed a vicious personal and corporate war to control the new technology of electricity. Set in the Gilded Age and inspired by true events, the story plays out as America is emerging as an industrial powerhouse. Women, minorities, and immigrants are demanding equality and Wall Street is giving rise to the mega-corporation. While Edison was America's most famous and successful inventor, Tesla was an eccentric immigrant who arrived in New York with only four cents in his pocket. Both men understood that their quest would change the course of mankind, but they could not foresee how it would change their lives and the lives of the women they loved. AGE OF POWER is a musical for our times. Edison and Tesla are the perfect heroes for an era when the excitement and fear of new technology is a national obsession. The underlying themes of innovation, immigration, self-empowerment, and corporate responsibility are as current today as they were at the dawn of the twentieth century.

A successful crowdfunding campaign was recently completed with $20K raised (including a $10K challenge grant from author Anna Lefler PRESCHOOLED: A NOVEL and CHICK-tionary) to produce the reading. For more information, go to www.AgeofPower.org

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